He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry but inexorably transitioned to cell biology and immunology research, developing molecules that report and manipulate signalling in living cells and animals.
Indeed some would describe chemistry in terms of what chemists do, for example designing and synthesizing new molecules and materials, developing new experimental methods and instrumentation to probe, characterize and manipulate molecules, and developing new theories and computational methods to understand and predict molecular behavior.
Gambhir's research seeks to identify and manipulate molecules that can be used to image in vivo biological processes, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Cornell physicists have shrunk the technology of an optical trap, which uses light to suspend and manipulate molecules like DNA and proteins, onto a single chip.
To achieve these ambitious goals, our laboratory has focused on the development of scalable technologies to detect, measure, and manipulate molecules and circuits, both at the sub-cellular level, and at the level of cell populations.
The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, the discovery of the fullerene family of molecules, the development of materials with size-dependent properties, and the ability to encode with and manipulate biological molecules such as DNA, are a few of the crucial developments that have changed this field.
The ability to measure and manipulate single molecules has greatly advanced the field of biophysics.
These two highly-sensitive surface scanning probe techniques go far beyond nano-imaging, by enabling researchers to localize and manipulate individual molecules on cell surfaces with nanoscale spatial resolution.
One of these, routinely used in our work, is atomic force microscopy which allows us to image and manipulate single molecules, cells, and membranes.
